After losing to Chris Jericho at AEW Full Gear 2019, Cody Rhodes could no longer challenge for the AEW World Championship during his tenure. Cody stated multiple times that he wasn't going to turn heel to get out of the stipulation.
By the end of Cody's run with AEW, the fans had turned on him, but he was adamant that he wouldn't be a heel.
Did that make him a heel?
"I definitely prefer being on the light side of things and being on the gold guy realm. I also, I think if you're going to be a bad guy today, you have to really be a bad guy," Cody told Ariel Helwani of BT Sport when asked if he prefers being a babyface or heel. "I'll give you an example, the number one thing a heel is supposed to do is take something away. The crowd wants to see something, they're stomping their feet and clapping their hands, you take it away. You have to know when to give it to them if you take it away. The last heel run that I had, the number one thing they wanted me to do was turn heel. The number one thing I could do was say, 'I'm never going to turn heel,' which makes me a heel. If people need further proof that this wasn't some revisionist history, look at the matches I was having, I'm bumping and feeding. Yeah, we throw the weight belt into the crowd and it gets thrown back. Then we do a dogpile spot 30 seconds later. Those aren't things that you just do on the fly. Maybe it was a bit too nuanced for any audience and maybe it was a scenario where I just swing and miss, you never know, because I think people thought I was adamant about not turning and that's not a real thing. You have to go with what they give you. I had two years of wonderful babyface hoorah and that was a nice way to go there at the end. Here [in WWE] though, I don't love the idea of being a heel here. Something could present itself and what you put out there is. I haven't thought about it at all. It's different, because I mention this younger audience, if they believe, I have to stick to that more than a smaller section of the audience."
Cody would reference being a heel on AEW television, and forget which tunnel he should go through. Cody ended his AEW career by losing the AEW TNT Championship to Sammy Guevara in a ladder match.
In WWE, Cody is the top babyface in the company and set to challenge Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship at WrestleMania 39.
Elsewhere during the interview, Cody discussed the possibility of MJF joining WWE. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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